Jack previously attended Cherwell School in Oxford and is said to have been a keen sportsman (Picture: Facebook)

A friend told MailOnline: ‘I feel like he has been exploited. No one wants to fight in Isis unless they’ve been brainwashed. It’s really alarming how powerfully he has changed.’

‘He was always an atheist, pretty liberal, typical middle-class kid. At school he was the class clown but didn’t take it too far, he was still smart and got fair grades.’

After developing an interest in the Middle East during the Arab Spring in 2011, Jack told his parents he was planning to travel to Kuwait to study Arabic.

He only informed them he had travelled to Syria after he arrived.

Sally said: ‘We were in utter shock. We have been trying to convince him to come back.’

‘We want him to go to a safe place. He is bemused by all the inaccuracies…The fact he has a son? He just laughed. Somehow he is supposed to be a global jihadi? It is absolutely ridiculous.’

A Scotland Yard spokesperson told the Standard that they did not comment on active cases.

He said: ‘What is important, and would be expected, is that we do all we can to keep people safe and investigate everyone who returns to the UK to establish if any crimes have been committed and if they are a threat to the UK’.